There is a growing interest in the use of small base stations, e.g., femtocells. As the size and number of users supported by a base station diminishes, the cost of the base station can be spread over fewer users. Accordingly, with regard to relatively small base stations, e.g., femtocells, from a commercial implementation perspective keeping hardware costs down becomes important. While keeping hardware costs down is important to commercial success being able to support multiple users at the same time can also be important.
In view of the above, it should be appreciated that there is a need for efficiently performing uplink processing, from a hardware prospective, while supporting multiple users.